I feel like I missed out on the Golden Age of IT work

Offering the perspective of a 45 year IT career, mostly civil service with extensive side hustling (contracting and entrepreneurial adventures)...: tl;dr - yup, those were good times, but they aren't gone, just different. I've been fortunate to have worked through a number of generations of computers and a few serious paradigm shifts. I started as a keypunch operator in the USAF, but quickly advanced to the systems level. These were all batch UNIVAC 1050-II, base supply computers. Stacks of punch cards, patching applications and systems, debugging devices... I was a kid in a fucking candy store. I also had an awesome mentor, an old TSgt, who was excited about my excitement. He'd call the house at night, and be like, "I'm going to run a system cycle, come up if you want." I'd be standing in front of his desk before he hung up the phone. For the next 5 years or so, I was a sysadm on Burroughs and Sperry mainframes, soon to become UNISYS. (We used to say that they took the best parts of Burroughs and the best parts of Sperry, threw them out, and formed UNISYS with the leftovers.) Then along came Unix servers. Man, did we bitch. Real-time applications, relational databases, progressive user communities... But I made the switch. In 1983, I became the first Unix admin in the place. Was also the systems guy on the MAPPER 4GL. I was quite happy to be the go-to guy; fed my ego. By 1995 I was the senior DBA on Oracle and one of the MVS sysadms. Installing compilers, debugging dumps, coordinating upgrades... I was the first certified Teradata DBA in our Detroit computing center. Big Data was my ticket. By 2005 I was managing various web sites, including a web server on MVS - Info builders stuff for Focus. Managed a massive (at the time) data warehouse on Oracle, having migrated away from Teradata. In 2015, I was supporting a number of Tier 2 and Tier 3 client server applications, which put me down with the network folks. Performance, throughput, advanced analytics on operations... Again, the go-to guy, and again, massive ego boost. I retired last year after a fairly successful cloud migration, overseeing the implementation of databricks, data pipelines, data management activities, and low-code/no-code transitions. The team is still hard at it, and I keep in touch (see ego above) on the translation of ALC and COBOL to Java. From batch to distributed to on-line to cloud. From flat files to relational to NoSQL databases. From punch cards to CRTs to laptops and mobile devices. From being excited to install patches for the new 16k disk devices - big washing machine like things - to having 12Tb my two workstations at home - I love building virtual machines, fiddling with them, then forgetting they are there. Notice the pattern here: I rolled from one paradigm shift to the next. I've found that, when you know what you're talking about, and are pushing AGAINST business as usual, people notice. And being 'the guy' isn't half bad. You can still get into the internals and debug things, but it's not longer octal core dumps or on-line monitoring, it's merging and integrating data and users, finding the right solutions, and supporting your customer base. I've programmed production code in 22 languages, and I've not mastered a one of them. But I know how to Get Shit Done. I've fought with countless engineers who want to build academically elegant solutions: Perfection is the enemy of getting shit done. It's nothing like what I did 10, 20, 30 years ago, but it's jutas fascinating and fulfilling as my first working Fortran program in 1972.